Four senior faculty awarded research leave grants

Photos/Mike Lovett

Faculty who have been awarded research leaves are, clockwise from top left, Faith Smith, Caren Irr, Ellen Schattschneider and Govind Sreenivasan.

April 10, 2013

Brandeis University has awarded four senior faculty research leaves for spring 2014. These competitive grants relieve the faculty member of teaching duties for a semester, providing flexible time for major research projects and a small amount of funding for research expenses.

“We received many strong proposals, and the selection committee was extremely impressed by the quality and breadth of the work that our colleagues are doing,” said Irving R. Epstein, PhD, the Henry F. Fischbach Professor of Chemistry and senior adviser to the provost for research.

The 2014 recipients and their projects:

Caren Irr, PhD, (English) is working on a project exploring the literary and intellectual history of orphans in a cross-cultural context from the United States and England to Korea, Brazil, East Africa and Russia.

Ellen Schattschneider, PhD, (Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies) will be working on her second book, "The Fetish Goes to War: Violence and its Simulacra in Modern Japan." The book explores how dolls and human-shaped figurines have helped manage memories of the dead in modern Japan, during war and peace.

Faith Smith, PhD, (English, Women’s and Gender Studies, and African and Afro-American Studies) will use novels, memoirs, travelogues, newspapers and photographs as sources for her book, “Whose Modern? Caribbean Cultural and Intellectual Formations, 1885-1915.” The work crosses imperial boundaries to examine the Caribbean people's engagements with their own and others’ modernities, at a historical moment when they were keenly aware of being subject to the intentions of either Britain, France or Spain, at any given moment (Haiti no less so for being independent), and, particularly after 1898, the United States.

Govind Sreenivasan, PhD, (History) will be exploring how a seventeenth century German peasant's legal conflicts and exile reflect the social history of peasants in early modern Europe, and how the struggles of European peasants compared to those in non-Western Eurasian societies, including Ottoman Turkey and Qing China.